Quotes & Sayings About Expendable

Africa will become an out-of-reach commodity instead of the expendable refuse heap we've treated her as. — Lidia Yuknavitch

You cannot win the war. You will seem to win but it will be an illusion. You will win the battles, kill billions, rape Worlds, take slaves, and destroy ships and weapons. But after that you will be forced to hold the subjection. Your numbers will not be expendable. You will be spread thin, exposed to other cultures that will influence you, change you. You will lose skirmishes, and in the end you will be forced back. Then will come a loss of old ethics, corruption and opportunism will replace your honor and you will know unspeakable shame and dishonor... your culture will soon be weltering back into a barbarism and disorganization which in its corruption and despair will be nothing like the proud tribal primitive life of its first barbarism. You will be aware of the difference and unable to return. — Charles V. De Vet

When I lost my record deal, and my phone wasn't ringing, I realized that I had to reassess who Vesta was and figure out what was going wrong. I knew it wasn't my singing ability. So it had to be that I was expendable because I didn't have the right look. — Vesta Williams

Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don't get the rocket back for inspection. — Henry Spencer

Progressives and Islamists are indeed on the same side. Their common disdain for Christianity explains why left-wing judges in America find any inkling of Christianity in the public square unconstitutional, while Islamist judges in the Middle East deem it executable. Their common view that life is expendable explains the left's embrace abortion-on-demand and why the Islamists don't hesitate to deploy their own children for homicide bombings. — Gary Bauer

So our reliance on the computers caused the failure of the mission?" asked the expendable.
"The mission didn't fail," said Ram. "It succeeded nineteen times. We're just the exhaust trail. — Orson Scott Card

But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people. — N.K. Jemisin

We're all expendable. We think the world's going to stop when a pope dies, or a king. And then ... life goes on. — Sylvester Stallone

We in the United States believe in the protection of minorities; we recognize the contributions that they can make and the leadership that they can provide; and we do not believe that any people - whether majority or minority, or individual human beings - are 'expendable' in the cause of theory or of policy. — Robert Kennedy

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers. — Harry S. Truman

And when we diverge, it will be impossible for the expendables and the ship's computers on all the ships to know which version of Ram Odin to obey," said Ram. "Therefore I order you and all the other expendables to immediately kill every copy of Ram except me."
"I'm so sorry," said the expendable. "One of the versions of Ram Odin did not include the word 'immediately,' and therefore his order was complete a fraction of a second before all the others. He is the real Ram Odin."
Ram gave a little half smile. "How ironic. By specifying that you should act at once-"
The expendable reached out with both hands, gave Ram's head a twist, and broke his neck. The sentence remained unfinished, but that did not matter, since the person saying it was not the real Ram Odin. — Orson Scott Card

Candor does not provide us with protection, sustenance, or technological innovation. Therefore you are expendable to us. — Veronica Roth

We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly. — John Pilger

To me, an economy that sees the life of a community or a place as expendable, and reckons its value only in terms of money, is not acceptable because it is not realistic. I am thinking as I believe we must think if we wish to discuss the best uses of people, places, and things, and if we wish to give affection some standing in our thoughts. — Wendell Berry

For some girls, our bodies are not immortal so much as
expendable, we have punished them or wearied
from dragging them around for so long and so we go

wearing the brilliant plumage of the possibly freed
by death. — Connie Voisine

It didn't matter that in her heart Frankie knew she was smart and charming.
What mattered was that feeling of being expendable. That to Porter, she was a nobody that could easily be replaced by a better model - and the better model wasn't even so great.
Which meant Frankie herself was nearly worthless. — E. Lockhart

Ships are expendable; the whales are not. — Paul Watson

Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable. — Richard Diebenkorn

DAMN! damn it all down
took one to the chest without even a sound so
WHAT! what are you worth
the things you love or the people you hurt
HEY! it's like deja vu
a suicidal maniac with nothing to lose
so wait, it's the exception to the rule
everyone of us in EXPENDABLE — Shinedown

So the price of careless rapture is a twisted history chronicled by envy.
You were too busy being. And you are too busy now. You couldn't spare the time to note down a few facts: how the sun and silence poured into the big room with the yellow curtains; how everything was never-ending and expendable. — Elizabeth Smart

Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret's Thatcher's Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of 'Fitzcarraldo', a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts:Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth,post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral. — Iain Sinclair

There is no greater sensation of consciousness than to expend yourself completely through the quickening fires of passion. — Bryant McGill

It's better to have fewer things of quality than too much expendable junk. — Rachel Zoe

You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor. — Justin Sewell

What if they take you captive?" Goradel asked.
"My dear man," Breeze said, leaning forward to look out at Goradel. "That's why kings send ambassadors. This way, if someone gets captured, the king is still safe. We, my friend, are something Elend can never be: expendable."
Goradel frowned at that. "I don't feel very expendable. — Brandon Sanderson

But as I peeked at my brother's inert body ... I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable. — Jeffrey Eugenides

We have discussed your definition, analyzed its ramifications to a reasonable depth, and accept it," said the expendable.
"Meaning I gave you what you wanted?"
"Ambition and desire are human traits. You gave us what we lacked. — Orson Scott Card

We're an ecological disaster."
"Exactly," said the expendable. — Orson Scott Card

I realize that I render people invisible because I am too ridiculously busy traveling to places far and wide to see people as anything more than an expendable tool to be used to facilitate those travels. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I have discussed this with him and he points out that the Rolex Oyster Perpetual weighs about six ounces and would appreciably slow up the use of his left hand in combat. His practice, in fact, is to use fairly cheap, expendable wrist watches on expanding metal bracelets which can be slipped forward over the thumb and used in the form of a knuckle-duster, either on the outside or the inside of the hand. — Ian Fleming

Love is not a forest fire that burns intensely,
hotly and out of control for a brief moment until,
its expendable fuel spent,
it sputters,
seeking in vain for something else to consume,
to sustain itself before, finally,
it dies:
cold, black ash the only evidence of its passing.
Love is, instead, a campfire:
it provides ample heat and comfort
to the twosome who sit before it,
and although its flames may at times wane,
a well-tended campfire's embers can be nurtured and fanned
until the flames once again dance brightly and cheerfully,
providing comfort to the couple
who cherish the gentle warmth it ministers. — J. Conrad Guest

All armies have expendable items. That is, a part or unit, the destruction of which will not be fatal to the whole. In some ordeals, a man might consider his finger expendable, but not his hand; or, in extremity, his arm but not his heart. There are expendable items which may be lost or destroyed in the field, either in peace or in war, without their owner being required to replace them. A rifle is so expendable or a cartridge belt. So are men.

Men are the most expendable of all. — Robert Leckie

We need Goddess consciousness to reveal earth's holiness. Divine feminine imagery opens up the notion that the earth is the body of the Divine, and when that happens, the Divine cannot be contained solely in a book, church, dogma, liturgy, theological system, or transcendent spirituality. The earth is no longer a mere backdrop until we get to heaven, something secondary and expendable. Mater becomes inspirited; it breathes divinity. Earth comes alive and sacred. And we find ourselves alive in the midst of her and forever altered. — Sue Monk Kidd

I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable. — Douglas Coupland

Watching this little scene makes my throat ache. It seems an apt metaphor for the role most men play--even in egalitarian modern marriages--as quasi-outsiders in their own families. Of course, men have always contributed importantly to the family, and our wives and children would miss us if we were gone. But there's also a tacit understanding that we are the expendable ones: if something evil comes through the front door, everyone knows whose job it is to die guarding the family's retreat out the back. Men are a little on the periphery of family life, cut off from the biologically precious mother and children as though by an invisible pane of glass. — Jonathan Gottschall

We're the expendable half of the species, ladies. We're designed to take down the bad guys, to save the children. We're your weapons, your attack dogs. We're ready to i.e. taking down the threats against you. There isn't much call for this in the twenty-first century, but this is our baggage. We're here to solve your problems, and when you have no need for our upper-body strength, raw courage, or foolish daring, we can be at a loss. — Shawn T. Smith

Bradshaw especially didn't like the use of the word "experiment" in regard to social conditions. Experiments included of necessity, expendable components. Failure was a precursor to success. When the components were human, who had the audacity to use, lose them, toss them away? — Bernadette Pajer

For the expendable marriage, you give the expendable gift. — John D. MacDonald

Education in a technological world of replaceable and expendable parts is neuter. — Marshall McLuhan

Remember that despite the fact that I'm a traitor and mass murderer, one of us is expendable, and it isn't me. — Yoon Ha Lee

I have reached the stage now where luxury is not in fine possessions but in carefree possessions, and the greatest luxury of all would be the completely expendable. — Nan Fairbrother

If you're trying to get out of debt, you have to be willing to treat everything as expendable. — Phil McGraw

Ned knew what it was like to feel useless. He had been the expendable grandchild, the non-heir. He'd been the fool, the idiot, the one who could be counted on to muck up anything worth doing. His grandfather had expected nothing of Ned, and Ned, young idiot that he had been, had delivered spectacularly. — Courtney Milan

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The — Nancy Isenberg

Ain't spacetime a bitch," said Ram. "Noted," said the expendable. "Nineteen times. — Orson Scott Card

I'm no different than any other expendable player. — Mo Williams

Just then, Larry recalled a conversation he had with a friend in Ireland, about the situation in Nepal between the King and the Maoists. The friend was sided with the Maoists, which was more or less his political leanings in any case, and stated that at least they were trying to help the people. So Larry had remarked upon the rising death rate, and how the Maoists are just as brutal as the security forces, yet the friend simply shrugged and said you have to expect some collateral damage in a revolution.
Oh how he hates that phrase, as that makes it sound like the people's lives are meant to be expendable, something that a person's life should never be. Of course, it is very easy to disregard people you have never met, and who are certainly not your friends or family members. After all, in the eyes of an outsider, who is in no danger whatsoever, the people caught up in the situation are nothing more than simply statistics. — Andrew James Pritchard

We are an adaptable species and this adaptability has enabled us to survive. However, adaptability can also constitute a threat; we may become habituated to certain dangers and fail to recognize them until it's too late. Nuclear armaments are the most conspicuous example; as you read this you are in effect wearing a military uniform and sitting in a very exposed trench. You exist at the whim of people whose power does not derive from your own consent and who regard you as expendable, disposable. You merely failed to notice the moment at which you were conscripted. A "normal" life consists in living as if this most salient of facts was not a fact at all. — Christopher Hitchens

If you're someone who is intimately involved with a true masochist, and yet can't bring yourself to actually hurt that person, you're like the guy wearing a red uniform on a Star Trek away-mission: expendable. — Michael Makai

I know we are supposed to welcome anyone who vows to protect the kingdom, but really, anyone will do anything for a copper these days, and where pride and promises are saleable, expendable men come very cheap indeed. — Michelle Franklin

One of the hard lessons Leia had learned during the Rebellion was this: Any single life was expendable, including her own. — Claudia Gray

Fossil fuels are merely a part of the "natural capital" which we steadfastly insist on treating as expendable, as if it were income, and by no means the most important part. If we squander our fossil fuels, we threaten civilisation; but if we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself. — Ernst F. Schumacher

Gays have rights, lesbians have rights, men have rights, women have rights, even animals have rights. How many of us have to die before the community recognizes that we are not expendable? — Octavia St. Laurent

Explore the situation. Statements are expendable. Don't keep on looking in the rearview mirror and defending the status quo which is outmoded the moment it happened. — Marshall McLuhan

Expendable was not the word I was looking to hear to boost my morale, but whatever. — Rachel Caine

So that's it?" asked the expendable.
"Final decision," said Ram. "And it's the right one."
"Why do you think so?"
"Because we live or die, we'll learn something important from jumping into the fold. Thousands of future travelers will either follow us or not. But if we don't make the jump, we'll learn nothing, have no new options."
"A lovely speech. It has been sent back to Earth. It will inspire millions."
"Shut up," said Ram. — Orson Scott Card

It may seem unimaginable to you that child soldiers exist and yet the reality for many rebel and gang leaders, and even state governments, is that there is no more complete end-to-end weapon system in the inventory of war machines than the child soldierMan has created the ultimate cheap, expendable, yet sophisticated human weapon at the expense of humanity's own future: its children. — Romeo Dallaire

I became a physician in order to help save lives. I am at once a physician, a citizen, and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live. — Mildred Fay Jefferson

All "if" statements about the past are as dubious as prophecies of the future are. It seems fairly plausible that if Alexander or Ghengis Khan had never been born, some other individual would have filled his place and executed the design of the Hellenic or Mongolic expansion; but the Alexanders of philosophy and religion, of science and art, seem less expendable; their impact seems less determined by economic challenges and social pressures; and they seem to have a much wider range of possibilities to influence the direction, shape and texture of civilizations. — Arthur Koestler

Maternal health generally gets minimal attention because those who die or suffer injuries overwhelmingly start with three strikes against them: They are female, they are poor, and they are rural. Women are marginalized in the developing world, They are an expendable commodity. — Nicholas D. Kristof

All managers are losers, they are the most expendable pieces of furniture on the face of the Earth. — Ted Williams

The undergarments were plain-and folded. Who folded their undergarments? Celeana thought of her enormous closet back home, exploding with colour and different fabrics and patterns, all tossed together. Her undergarments, while expensive, usually wound up in a heap in their drawer. Sam, probably, folded his undergarments. Though, depending on how much of him Arobynn left intact, he might not be able to now. Arobynn would never permanently main her, but Sam might have faired worse. Sam had always been the expendable one. — Sarah J. Maas

We can take my van," I offered.
"Thank you," said Adam, "but you are staying here."
I raised my chin, and he patted my cheek - the patronizing bastard. He laughed at my expression, not like he was making fun of me, but like he was really enjoying something ... me.
"You are not expendable, Mercedes - and you are not up to facing a pack war." By the time he'd finished speaking the smile had left his face, and he was watching the people in the room.
"Listen, buddy," I said. "I killed two werewolves - that makes my kill sheet as high as yours this week - and I didn't do so badly getting that address from the vampires, either."
"You got the address from the vampires?" said Adam, in a dangerously soft voice. — Patricia Briggs

Women are dirt searchers; their greatest worth is irradicating rings on collars and tables. Never mind real-estate boards' corruption and racism, here's your soapsuds. Everything she is doing is peripheral, expendable, crucial, and non-negotiable. Cleanliness is next to godliness. — Florynce Kennedy

Over the years we seem to have become habituated, even addicted, to the notion of radical threat, threat of the kind that can make virtually anything seem expendable if it does not serve an immediate, desperate purpose of self-defense
as defined by people often in too high a state of alarm to make sound judgments about what real safety would be or how it might be achieved, and who feel that their duty to the rest of us is to be very certain we share their alarm. Putting to one side the opportunities offered by the coercive power of fear, charity obliges me to assume that their alarm is genuine, though i grant that in doing so I again raise questions about the soundness of their judgment. — Marilynne Robinson

But I am designed to last forever," said the expendable, "if not interfered with."
"Isn't that nice? Expendable yet eternal. You'll be able to go back and observe any part of human history that you wish. Watch the pyramids being unbuilt. See the ice ages go and come in reverse. Watch the de-extinction of the dinosaurs as a meteor leaps out of the Gulf of Mexico."
"I will have no useful task. I will not be able to help the human race in any way. My existence will have no meaning after you are dead."
"Now you know how humans feel all the time. — Orson Scott Card

Whoop-de-do," said Ram.
"What?"
"I'm celebrating."
"Was that irony or loss of mental function?" asked the expendable.
"Was that a rhetorical questions, a bit of humor, or a sign that you are losing confidence in me?"
"I have no confidence in you, Ram," said the expendable.
"Well, thanks."
"You're welcome. — Orson Scott Card

But that could not have been the main cause of the carnage, because in subsequent centuries the technology kept getting deadlier while the death toll came back to earth. Luard singles out religious passion as the cause: It was above all the extension of warfare to civilians, who (especially if they worshipped the wrong god) were frequently regarded as expendable, which now increased the brutality of war and the level of casualties. Appalling bloodshed could be attributed to divine wrath. The duke of Alva had the entire male population of Naarden killed after its capture (1572), regarding this as a judgement of God for their hard-necked obstinacy in resisting; just as Cromwell later, having allowed his troops to sack Drogheda with appalling bloodshed (1649), declared that this was a "righteous judgement of God." Thus by a cruel paradox those who fought in the name of their faith were often less likely than any to show humanity to their opponents in war. — Steven Pinker

We must stop treating the environment possessively, and as an expendable commodity. — Bryant McGill

The history of fossil-fuel development has always been that certain people are expendable. What's changed is that new, larger populations are now considered expendable. — Josh Fox

Jesus lived in occupied territory, in poverty and misery, and his stories and preaching are all about food, land, liberation from bondage and servitude and get. He preached about providing for those who lacked the most and were considered expendable, as the birds of the air, and yet in Jesus' eyes were where one found the treasure of heaven, here, now, on earth. — Megan McKenna

You're not - " "Fast enough? Strong enough? Agile enough?" She did not necessarily disagree, but she wanted him to have faith she could do this. "Expendable," Sicarius said. — Lindsay Buroker

From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable. — Jimmy Reid

Our society has long treated men as machines, as bodies expendable in the name of progress or profit. Men have overruled their pain and soul's delight, taught to think of themselves as "mechanisms". Such an estrangement wounds very deeply; it has gone on so long and is so taken for granted that healing individuals, let alone a whole gender, is a dubious undertaking. But the beat goes on, the Saturnian shadow lives, the only game in town, and shame on the defector. The wounding is institutionalized and sanctified, and men unwittingly collude in their own crucifixion. — James Hollis

The unholy alliance of science, technology, and industry has given birth to monstrous offspring that threaten the very future of the planet. From factory farming to the harvesting of human eggs, commodified science and technology comes with a utilitarian ethic. Life is cheap. Forests, animals, and people are raw materials. Everyone and everything is expendable.50 Whatever brings the greatest profit is worth the violence. God is calling the church in the night to retrieve the meaning of stewardship first and foremost as caring for the earth.51 Evangelism is not good news until it is good news for all of creation, for humanity, animals, plants, water, and soil, for the earth that God created and called good. — Elaine A. Heath

I believe that a nation that allows music to be expendable is in danger of becoming expendable itself. — Richard Dreyfuss

Today, you expand or you are expendable. — Les Brown

We queers of Revelation hill ... died of the greed of power, because we were expendable. If you mean to visit any of us, it had better be to make you strong to fight that power. Take your languor and easy tears somewhere else. Above all, don't pretty us up. Tell yourself: None of this ever had to happen. And then go make it stop, with whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it is nothing. — Paul Monette

Then, in the 1980's, came the paroxysm of downsizing, and the very nature of the corporation was thrown into doubt. In what began almost as a fad and quickly matured into an unshakable habit, companies were 'restructuring,' 'reengineering,' and generally cutting as many jobs as possible, white collar as well as blue ... The New York Times captured the new corporate order succintly in 1987, reporting that it 'eschews loyalty to workers, products, corporate structures, businesses, factories, communities, even the nation. All such allegiances are viewed as expendable under the new rules. With survival at stake, only market leadership, strong profits and a high stock price can be allowed to matter'. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Men are expendable; women and children are not. A tribe or a nation can lose a high percentage of its men and still pick up the pieces and go on ... as long as the women and children are saved. — Robert A. Heinlein

Adrienne Rich had it right. No one gives a crap about motherhood unless they can profit off it. Women are expendable and the work of childbearing, done fully, done consciously, is all-consuming. So who's gonna write about it if everyone doing it is lost forever within it? You want adventures, you want poetry and art, you want to salon it up over at Gertrude and Alice's, you'd best leave the messy all-consuming baby stuff to someone else. Birthing and nursing and rocking and distracting and socializing and cooking and washing and gardening and mending: what's that compared with bullets whizzing overhead, dazzling destructive heroics, headlines, parties, — Elisa Albert

What are your qualifications for this job?" she asked. "I'm expendable," I said. — Ilona Andrews

Teachers are expendable, overworked, underpaid, and many times disrespected by students, parents and higher-ups. Nonetheless, these teachers still show up because there are some who are teachers indeed. — Monica Johnson

The military is such a hierarchical institution. It's an institution where, if you are assaulted by a person senior to you, you're probably the person that's expendable and that's going to get in trouble. — Joy-Ann Reid

I've thought about it," she said. "And I'm angry, Shane. I'm really angry. After everything we've done, everything we've risked, we're expendable. And it hurts. Believe me. — Rachel Caine

What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have. — Peter Singer

The principle victims of British policies are Unpeople - those whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain. They are the modern equivalent of the 'savages' of colonial days, who could be mown down by British guns in virtual secrecy, or else in circumstances where the perpetrators were hailed as the upholders of civilisation. — Mark Curtis

The death of those considered expendable to achieve such goals only leaves blood to drown the earth with the memory of corruption and confusion. — Tami Egonu

Stale beer sticks to wobbling tables. The cigarette machine flashes in the corner, mocking smokers who never have any change on them. There's no natural light in this pub, so it's dark and gloomy. The pain on the face of the staff tells its own story: overworked, underpaid, exploited and treated as expendable. I feel at home with them. They're so scared they will be fired from their terrible jobs, every time I order a beer they ask me if I want any peanuts or crisps, in case between drinks I've turned into the dreaded mystery shopper. The air is chewy and weighs heavy on the skin. The fruit machines in the corners don't make a sound, aware this is the last stop saloon for the drunk few who can't afford to gamble properly. Everyone here is down to their last pint and pound. — Craig Stone